Here's an original song that Jack and I recorded recently. It's kinda different from a lot of our stuff but somehow feels like early Pomplamoose. The nostalgic vibe made us want to go through some old footage (on mini DV tapes!), so we included some of that in the video. Hard to believe we've been at it for this long. Couldn't have picked a better person to work with, or a better group of people to share our music with for that matter. :)

I'm walking on sunshine because our ALBUM IS OUT. It's call BESIDES and it's available on iTunes (http://apple.co/1K8QKkt) and Loudr (http://ldr.fm/rbtq7) and Spotify (http://spoti.fi/1Hc9kcz)!!!

Thank you so much for making these videos possible. We were planning on posting this earlier today but ran into a PLETHORA of technical difficulties. They seem to be MOSTLY resolved now. Anyhow, thanks for your patience and HAPPY ALBUM DAY!!!

Salut les patreotes !

J'espère que votre début d'été se passe bien, et que les parisiens ne souffrent pas trop de la canicule. De mon coté, comme vous le savez je suis en Finlande pendant encore une petite semaine ; l'environnement est sublime (vous pouvez voir des photos sur Facebook.com/NotPatrick et les autres réseaux sociaux), mais il fait moins de 20 degrés depuis notre arrivée, donc le choc du retour va être violent !

Et depuis la fin de la conférence gaming E3, je suis en "vraies" vacances, avec aucun enregistrement au programme... Ca faisait des années que ça ne m'était pas arrivé, ça fait très bizarre. :)

Mais je ne vous abandonne pas pour autant ! Comme promis, nous avons enregistré un numéro spécial dont je suis très fier, et dont je pense qu'il plaira et sera utile à beaucoup d'entre vous : le sympathique Jérôme (alias Genma) et moi-même entreprenons de vous expliquer simplement et de manière distrayante (comme toujours) les bases de l'hygiène informatique. Nous parlons de gestionnaires de mots de passe, d'authentification double facteur, de VPN... Nous connaissons tous les termes ou les concepts, mais nous sommes nombreux à ne pas maitriser les bases de ces outils pourtant essentiels à nos usages quotidiens.

Je reprends cette image : nous nous lavons tous les mains tous les jours (du moins j'espère, et même plusieurs fois par jour !), parce que nous savons culturellement que c'est important. Et pourtant nous ne nous préoccupons pas de l'hygiène de nos petites bêtes en silicone, alors que nous les utilisons presque autant ! Cet épisode représente donc le "minimum à savoir" pour commencer à mener une vie informatique plus saine... :)

Bonne écoute à tous, et rendez-vous dans quinze jours pour un nouvel épisode classique, et en attendant je vous envois plein de bises Finlandaises...

http://frenchspin.fr/2015/06/le-rendez-vous-tech-162-initiation-alhygiene-informatique/

Salut les patreotes ! Un petit épisode d'été de deux heures, ça vous dit ? :)

Nous avions beaucoup de choses à dire (forcément quand Cédric Ingrand est de la partie), donc ça a pris un peu de temps... Mais ça les vaut : nous évoquons avec tristesse la mort de Satoru Iwata, de Nintendo, que nous avons appris quelques heures avant l'enregistrement, avant de nous lancer sur Apple Music et un bilan plus posé de l'Apple Watch, de parler de Microsoft et de leur attitude inquiétante face à Windows Phone, et de partir sur la question du "premium" sur Internet, à l'occasion de l'annonce par le site de jeux vidéo Gamekult, que j'apprécie particulièrement, de leur nouvelle formule premium. Nous développons les raisons qui les ont poussé à faire ce choix avec Thomas, rédacteur en chef du site, et nous évoquons cette tendance, à laquelle je crois, que l'idée de payer pour certaines choses sur Internet commence à faire son petit bout de chemin (idée à laquelle vous n'êtes d'ailleurs pas totalement étrangers vous-mêmes. :)

Et nous parlons ensuite de l'affaire taxis vs Uber (il fallait vraiment que je vous dise ce que j'ai sur le coeur à ce sujet !), des soucis de Reddit, de Hacking Team et de bien d'autres choses.

Deux heures donc pour un épisode d'été dont j'espère qu'il vous plaira ! Comme toujours, n'hésitez surtout pas à commenter, ici, sur le site, sur Twitter, Facebook ou ailleurs... Plein de bises à tous !

http://frenchspin.fr/2015/07/le-rendez-vous-tech-163-internet-premium/

PS : Désolé d'ailleurs pour les soucis de son que nous avons rencontré ; le plus important, le message, reste là. :)

So I recorded this song in the bathtub with the back of my parlor guitar pressed up against the tub to amplify the sound. This is definitely one of those songs that'll sound better on headphones than on a laptop. 

Lyrics:

What are we doing here

My body it aches and toils

And my soul is restless for tomorrow

Wringin' out all my fear

Oh what are we waiting for

Don't you dare say it'll be easier tomorrow

I could lose everything

And I probably will

Everything but my faith in you

Countin' up all my Kings

Security can't be bought

It can only be bargained for tomorrow

And girl you ain't worth a thing

Except what your hand has caught

So don't you wait for it to be given to you tomorrow.

Salut les patreotes ! Tous se passe bien sur la plage ? Ou au boulot en plein été ? Dans les deux cas (et tous les autres), j'espère que je pourrai contribuer à égailler encore un peu plus votre journée, puisque le nouveau RDV Tech est disponible !

Jeff fait son retour, et JP Encausse fait son entrée, pour que nous parlions tous ensemble de Windows 10, de quelques résultats intéressants des grands entreprises de la tech, mais aussi un peu de la loi sur le renseignement, de deep learning et de l'invasion des robots qui a commencée... Tout un programme ! Enregistré avec amour pour vos oreilles, et disponible sur le site comme toujours. :)

Plein de bises, racontez-moi comment se passent vos vacances, et on se retrouve dans deux semaines pour le prochain !

http://frenchspin.fr/2015/07/le-rendez-vous-tech-164-windows-tuile/

HOLA COMRADES....

(this is a free public post. $3+ patrons will be getting a separate post with their download code for the video: watch for it!)

Oi! okay, i'm back in action….more or less. still a little under the weather, on antibiotics and probiotics and all the biotics but feeling way better. 

thank you all for so much care and kindness and lymey-spiney advice over the past few weeks. i feel really loved. lyme disease is clearly a nasty nasty thing.

so many people with undetected chronic lyme have contacted me, offering to share their wisdom. i’ve been calling it the “silent rock star killer”. i knew about kathleen hanna,

and avril lavigne, but there are OTHERS. i want to start a super-group with all them called SubLyme. our hit will be “what i got”. ask me no further questions about this….

and now we can get back to business 

presenting .....*drum roll*.......

my first ANIMATED THING!!

it's a *weird* one. 

but I'm really really proud of it, and i’ve been working on it in secret for months.

the story goes like this. 

i tend to use the voice memo function of my iphone for all sorts of things - but mostly song ideas that i almost never come back to. i sing melodies or to chatter a lyric to myself, or to dictate a thread of an idea for a talk if i'm driving and can’t jot shit down. and mostly i never go back and listen to any of this shit. mostly it just stayed like so much urban-myth undigested bubble gum in the pit of some digital art-stomach for years and years. 

this is not a habit i picked up once i had a smart phone. i used to just carry on these terrible habits with recording cassette walkmen, then for a terrible span of lost time in the late 1990s and early 2000s with minidisc, DAT, microcassette, and some weird nameless handheld digital voice recorder (I never really did figure out how to use any of them. I always missed my Walkman). the funny thing is, I have all my recorded Walkman tapes really organized. everything after about 1998 is a lost and disorganized mess. there's no central filing system. there's no single hard-drive. there's just shit everywhere - old phones that died or were lost with recordings on them, song ideas I emailed to myself but never really put anywhere, leaving scores of ideas to be post to various laptops and abandoned email systems. it's kind of a tragedy. but like my lost wedding dress and wedding vows (I know, I'm fucking terrible) I figure the passage of time flattens everything out. and maybe all those  songs were no good anyway. we will never know. 

in desperate times back in the late 1990s, if I was somewhere and without a recording device, I discovered the handy-dandy trick of caking my own voicemail and leaving myself song ideas. those were all certainly lost to time, but I was actually more disciplined about retrieving them, because I knew they had a short life. 

but all along I was, unwittingly, exercising whatever odd head-muscle must learn to *not* to feel foolish whilst humming nonsense words and half-baked rhymes in off-key whispers into phones at the the bottom of coat closets at friends parties. 

and nowadays I just use my iphone. 

now….fact: neil gaiman is a total weirdo when he's half asleep. in a GOOD way, usually. you know all that cray shit he's been writing for the past 30 years? it has to come from *somewhere*. the guy is a fleshy repository of surreal strangeness, and he's at his best when he's in the twilight zone of half-wakefulness. he's the strangest sleeper I've ever slept with (let's not get into who I've slept with...different animation) not just because of the bizarro things that come out of his mouth when he's in the gray area, but because he actually seems to take on a totally different persona when he's asleep. and when that dude shows up, the waking neil gaiman is impossible to get back, unless you really shout him awake. jekyll and hyde shit. if i ever get around to it, i want to write a neil gaiman instruction manual for whatever wife comes after me in case I die or we get divorced or whatever. i feel like it would make a good read in general. 

to be fair, and in his defense: neil has pointed out that i sometimes talk in my sleep and i say some pretty insane stuff. but I'm never around to hear it, so, you know, i just have to take his word for it. 

(i just texted and asked him to remind me of an example…he wrote back that i said “i want to go dancing and i don’t want them to take the sheep, don’t let them take the sheep”)

anyway, most of the time when he spouts some really surreal gems i just enjoy the carnival sideshow of Sleeping Neil and go off to sleep myself. but sometimes the shit is so good i write it down, mostly so i can tell him about it in the morning. 

when I found this voice memo, I couldn't even remember where we were when I recorded it...in a hotel somewhere, i think, and I am pretty sure i recorded it in the bathroom so i wouldn't bug neil. maybe i recorded it the following morning. i don't remember. 

all I know is that I was looking for some other recording ages later and I saw this untitled snippet and played it back and thought it was hilarious. 

and then I played it for neil and HE thought it was hilarious. 

i'd been recently watching the "blank on blank” animations (if you don’t know them…they’re amazing. here’s one of my favorites, a janis joplin interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdF4b1_LQnQ) and was really inspired by what these surreal animators were doing with found sound recordings and interviews that were never intended to be animated, and i thought...this would such make a perfect animation.

i was at TED at the time I uncovered it - march of this last spring - and neil and i happened to be having dinner with maria popova (http://www.brainpickings.org/) and a random friend of hers. neil was so chuffed with the recording I'd found on my phone that he pulled out a set of headphones at the restaurant and said "play them the thing! play them the thing!"...and so i did, and i watched maria getting that delighted-yet-profound bulgarian look on her face. i mentioned it would make an amazing animation and it turns out that maria's random friend was logan smalley, who runs TED Ed (http://ed.ted.com/), which is basically an amazing little factory of awesome educational animated clips. he said he'd help me find an animator...and along with fishing around and asking on social media, i landed avi ofer (this was the clip of avi's  that really sold me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQTQSbjecLg. you can see all his work here: http://www.aviofer.com/).

(a note here: i made pals with a handful of great animators who we didn’t wind up using…but many of them are excited to do stuff in the future. sooooo…i’m just saying. we could do more animated Things and i’d be happy as a clambake, and we’d get to give work to some super-talented artists).

so there we were. i hired avi, i dumped my basic ideas and vibe out in an email, sent him a bunch of reference clips and animations i liked, and we talked ideas and concepts on the phone and over email for a month or two. then he and his team got to work. they sent along their progress and every clip was like getting a little christmas present in my email, watching it take shape and grow….

I love what we ended up with. I hope you love it too. 

in closing, this is the thing i actually love most about this story:

unlike the songs I've released here so far: this project wouldn't have HAPPENED without the patreon. 

animating is time-consuming, and the artists need to get paid to slave over their hot animating stoves. 

and i know you guys love me and everything, but I also know what the market will bear as far as weird thing-content like this goes: if I simply fronted the money for this and then put it on YouTube with a nice little tip bucket at the bottom, it'd probably never recuperate a tenth of what it cost to make. likewise, if i fronted the money and then put it onsale, as a paywalled film on iTunes or whatever, it would be appreciated by a few hardcore folks….but locked and out of circulation. it couldn't go onto love a happy healthy youtube and vimeo life, where animations belong so that they can be shared. 

i know I'm also taking a risk, doing this one. there may well be people supporting the patreon here who are like THIS IS NOT THE THINGS I WANTED. if that's you, i encourage you to speak up. i am listening. this whole patreon Thing-thing is, as I made clear at the outset, an experiment. 

and for a moment, all you fine Patreon people, give yourselves a pat on the back. your support means that something now exists that never ever would have existed. 

in a way, that's priceless. 

i love you guys. 

xxxx

afp 

p.s. if you're reading this and you're not a patron, I enthusiastically encourage you to join, especially if you’ve managed to read this far in the blog. when you join, these blogs and content will be emailed straight to your inbox, you can join the comments, and you'll be joining a fantastic & supportive community of weirdos. and I'll love you forever for helping me to Make the Things. patreon 

p.p.s. you $3+ folks have a download link coming in a separate blog/email. watch for it. you $10+ patrons have a long overdue webcast coming your way. watch for that, too. patreon 4eva. 

p.p.p.s. i just showed this clip to whitney’s roommate alexei and he alerted me to http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/. oh my god. it’s an epidemic of mild-mannered british men who say weird shit in their sleep! 

ALSO: all the links:

YOUTUBE

http://youtu.be/9QlDX8mPAcc

VIMEO

https://vimeo.com/134945314

Here's a little ol' fashioned folk song I wrote this week. Fun fact: I'm wearing those sunglasses because of an eye infection (gross.) Not because I'm too cool for school. Well, that too. But mainly my eye looks bad.

Hope you enjoy...

Et voici encore un RDV Tech estival !

On y parle des "fondamentaux" : Apple, Microsoft, Google (et Facebook et Twitter !), mais aussi des petites choses intéressantes comme Dot, la montre connectée pour non voyants, ou Slack, l'outil de communication d'entreprise qui a le vent en poupe en ce moment...

Le tout animé avec talent par MONSIEUR Jérôme Keinborg et surtout par les patreotes du moment, Guillaume, Nicolas et Mika, qui portent dans l'émission la voix de sa communauté. :) Un grand merci à eux, qui m'ont fait passer un très bon moment, et comme toujours à vous tous de l'avoir rendu possible !

J'espère que vous passerez un aussi bon moment que moi, et je vous donne rendez-vous dans 15 jours pour la suite.

Bises patreotiques <3

http://frenchspin.fr/2015/08/le-rendez-vous-tech-165-les-fondamentaux/

Hello Patrons! Here's an original song for you off the new album, Besides. ALSO we are opening for Ben Folds on September 16th in SF so if you wanna come see that you can get tickets here! http://www.axs.com/events/280499/ben-folds-ymusic-tickets

Thank you for making all this craziness possible.

C'est la fin de l'été et la rentrée pointe le bout de son nez, mais heureusement il y a un remède infaillible et scientifiquement prouvé par les plus grands chercheurs au monde : le RDV Tech ! :)

Dans cet épisode, Guillaume de Statosphère et moi-même vous parlons du mystérieux groupe "Alphabet-Google", des nouveaux téléphones Samsung, du hack d'Ashley Madison, de l'extension de la redevance télé, et de plein d'autres choses encore...

Bonne écoute à tous, et merci à vous de rendre cette émission possible !

http://frenchspin.fr/2015/08/le-rendez-vous-tech-166-le-g-cest-google/

Salut les patreotes !

C'est la rentrée et le début de l'automne, mais ça veut aussi dire que l'activité tech reprend de plus belle, donc en fait c'est une bonne nouvelle ! :)

Pour l'occasion, Cédric et Geoffrey se joignent à moi pour un épisode extra long (plus de deux heures !) ou nous épluchons les annonces de l'IFA, nous dévoilons avant l'heure les nouveautés d'Apple, nous vous tenons au courant des développements chez AirBNB, dans l'industrie du livre numérique, chez les assistants virtuels, et bien plus encore...

J'espère que vous apprécierez ce premier épisode de septembre, je vous fais des bises spéciales de patreotes comme toujours... Bonne écoute !

http://frenchspin.fr/2015/09/le-rendez-vous-tech-167-lhome-du-futur-et-la-pomme/

Salut les patreotes !

Un deuxième RDV Tech de septembre, lui aussi placé sous le signe des média. Télévision, blocage de pubs, redevances... Nous explorons et nous approfondissons ces sujets avec Cédric Ingrand (ce qui veut dire, comme les habitués le savent bien, que l'épisode est forcément en version extra-large... Pour notre plus grand plaisir. :)

Et pour être sûr de ne léser personne, nous avons même mis la partie Apple en fin d'émission, comme ça ceux qui en ont assez du tourbillon médiatique de la pomme peuvent passer à autre chose après leur épisode tout de même déjà bien rempli...

Bonne écoute, et à dans quinze jours !

http://frenchspin.fr/2015/09/le-rdv-tech-168-on-est-rarement-seul-a-avoir-une-bonne-idee/

So THANKS to Dave Retan (one of my patrons) for recommending that I cover a Kelly Clarkson tune! I took some liberties with this one. Hope you enjoy. And I'm still keeping all y'all's recommendations in mind for future covers, while I work on the new album :D

You may recognize Carlos Cabrera from our Superman's Song collaboration or if you've seen Pomplamoose play live. He's a great drummer, and one of my best friends. He also works at Patreon now as their head data analyst (such a smart kiddo...) Anyhow, he's one of my favorite people in the world, and I'm so so glad we got to drive around Sonoma, Marin and San Francisco filming these random objects. Such a great great day :)